The Liberal Coalition

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47 entries categorized "History"

Saturday, 22 August 2009

(Apologies for the atrocious grammar in the post title: It was deliberately done to make the point.)

It is a regrettable truism in textbook publishing that as Texas goes, so goes the nation. With so many schools needing books, the biggest states like Texas and California have a disproportionate influence on what is, and is not, available from textbook publishers. No publisher wants to come out with a book that school districts in mega-states won't buy, so they tend to tailor their materials to what they know they'll be able to market in the biggest markets they have available to them.

This should be a textbook illustration of why unfettered capitalism is not always a good thing. But of course, such an opinion would be highly unlikely to pass muster with the Texas Education Agency, which recently released a draft of its new standards (PDF link) for the teaching of U.S. history since the Reconstruction. The standards were revised with the advice of what the TEA terms expert reviewers, though I would argue that their definition of that term is considerably looser than most historians would probably be comfortable with. Of the six individuals listed, two are professors of history, two are tied to evangelical ministries and have absolutely no academic background in history whatsoever, one is a lawyer whose academic background is not clear, and one is a professor of education with no discernible training in history.

I don't recognize the name of either of the two historians on the panel, but that is not in and of itself significant, since I'm a Europeanist by trade. According to his bio page at Texas State University, Jesus Francisco de la Teja holds a Ph.D. in Latin American history from the University of Texas at Austin. How this qualifies him to address U.S. history is not precisely clear to me. Lybeth Hodges' biography page at Texas Woman's University does not explicitly address either her academic background or her research interests, which is somewhat unusual in academic history. It does seem to me that both of the historians on the panel were chosen primarily for having done all of their academic work in Texas, rather than having the academic background to be able to address questions of American history.

Don't even get me started on having two evangelical Christians empaneled as "expert reviewers." Both David Barton and Peter Marshall appear to have an interest in history, but "having an interest" in a subject is not the same thing as having the necessary background and training to be able to evaluate how it is taught--not to mention the fact that the majority of both men's interest in history appears to involve removing from the teaching of history anything of which they personally disapprove (and they disapprove of quite a bit). If it were not such a serious issue, it would be hugely ironic to see, in Mr. Barton's review of the current standards (PDF link), his disgust that so few American high school graduates can, among other things, find Iraq on a map, name even one Cabinet-level agency in the federal government, or state the freedoms protected by the First Amendment. I agree with Mr. Barton that this lack of what I would consider elementary knowledge is appalling--but I would also argue that it is precisely the inclusion of people like Mr. Barton on review committees that explains why so few of our students come out of high school in possession of such elementary knowledge. They are too busy being force-fed blind patriotism and religious dogma in the guise of education to have the time needed to learn and remember things that are truly important.

It is also ironic to see that the draft standards include (p. 13) an expectation that students will be able to "use standard grammar, spelling, sentence structure, and punctuation" (an expectation which Mr. Barton derided as belonging more to language arts than to social studies or history), when, in one of the comments (A47, on page 5), the reviewers or the staffer who put together their recommendations into final form described Chester Nimitz as the "navel [sic] commander in the Pacific theater." (I should also note that, while the note in question says that Nimitz was added to the list of significant military leaders in World War II, his name does not in fact appear on the list of such leaders that students are expected to know about.) And while I agree that Nimitz played a significant role in WWII as CinCPac (and would argue that he was far more significant a military leader than Douglas MacArthur was), I suspect that his being a Texan might also have an impact on why the TEA wants students to learn about him.

It is not too much to ask, I believe--and particularly in an era when we are trying to get back to the idea that before someone can be certified to teach a particular subject, s/he should have to have received some academic training in it--that anyone asked to review educational standards should have to have the relevant academic background to be able to address whatever standards s/he is being asked to evaluate. If we're talking about the standards for teaching history, then we should be asking historians. If we're talking about mathematics, then it should be mathematicians on the panel--and not megachurch ministers, even if they're very good at counting to large numbers. Parents would rightly be outraged to learn that their children were being taught by people who had no real training in the material they were trying to teach. Why should they be satisfied to have "experts" reviewing the curricular standards that their children's teachers will be forced to follow (and which will likely have a disproportionate impact on the kind of textbooks get published for the next five to ten years) who lack such training?

Wednesday, 10 June 2009

The title of this post is from the Vulgate Latin of Genesis 28:17. Of old, it was the Introit or entrance hymn proper to the dedication of a new church in the Catholic tradition. Literally translated, it means "This is a terrible place," but "terrible" needs to be understood not in the modern sense of something awful or bad, but a place that inspired awe. I'd have said "awesome," but those connotations are not right, either--especially in view of the context in which I'm writing.

Stephen Tyrone Johns, 39, a security guard at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (of which I have the honor to be a charter member), was shot and killed this afternoon in the line of duty at the museum. An 88-year-old Maryland man, James W. von Brunn, walked into the museum carrying a rifle, pointed it at Mr. Johns, and pulled the trigger. Mr. Johns did not even have time to draw his own weapon. Mr. von Brunn, described as a "hard-core" white supremacist (is there another kind?), was wounded by other guards who returned fire. He is listed in critical condition at George Washington University Hospital.

This was heller Wahnsinn, to use the language Mr. von Brunn's ancestors probably spoke, "utter madness." Wahn is virtually an untranslatable word in German--there is no clear English cognate. "Madness," "insanity," "mania," "delusion," "craziness"--all fit, but none of them precisely.

The last time I was in Washington, I visited the Holocaust Memorial Museum for the first time. It was, indeed, both a terrible and an awesome place: not quite the equal, in my estimation, of Yad Vashem in Jerusalem, but nevertheless a hallowed place for what it commemorates and the work that goes on there. Terribilis est locus iste, indeed. The museum may not, to carry on with the text of Genesis, be literally a domus Dei et porta caeli, "the house of God and the gate of heaven," but it is certainly now a more terrible and awesome place for having the blood of a martyr spilled at its very gates.

My thoughts and prayers go out to the family of Mr. Johns. I will leave them with some words that may perhaps provide some comfort in their time of sorrow:

...all mankind is of one author and is one volume; when one man dies, one chapter is not torn out of the book, but translated into a better language; and every chapter must be so translated. God employs several translators; some pieces are translated by age, some by sickness, some by war, some by justice; but God's hand is in every translation, and his hand shall bind up all our scattered leaves again for that library where every book shall lie open to one another.

Tuesday, 22 July 2008

There are days when it's good to be me. (No, really!) And I had one of them last week. After pigging out on an assortment of outstandingly good frozen custard from Ollie's at the annual meeting of the Friends of the NIU Libraries (on whose board I've served for the past year), I literally got a chance to touch some history--some history that I helped get for the library.

Let's go back a few months to the end of the spring semester. At the end of a fiscal year, the library will often have some money left over--savings from purchases that turned out to have bigger discounts than anticipated, book purchase funds that weren't fully spent, and the occasional gift that comes in and can't find an immediate use. When that happens, all the librarians (and anyone else who wants to put an oar in) are asked to submit prioritized lists of "expensive purchases." "Expensive," in this context, means an item that costs more than $250, if I remember correctly: the sort of thing that even libraries have to think twice about adding to the purchase order, unless they're the University of Illinois or Yale or Harvard.

After the requests come rolling in, a committee is formed to go over the requests and recommend funding priorities, and the library will work its way down the list, buying things until it runs out of available money. The lucky ones get their items, and the unlucky ones have to wait another year, or try to find a less-expensive source, or come up with some extra cash. But we're usually able to get quite a lot off the wish-lists. This year, I got picked for the committee. We met and did our job, and the money was duly spent.

One of the items on this year's list was a cuneiform tablet dated to around 2000 B.C.E.--and costing around $2,000. Some members of the committee balked at spending that much for an item that's about the size of a large postage stamp and which nobody at the university (to our knowledge, anyway) can even read. I, on the other hand, thought it was a fantastic idea, and argued successfully to keep it on the list. It was duly purchased and now lives in our rare books and special collections area. And after the Friends meeting, the RBSC librarian let me hold it. Right there in my own little hands, this chunk of baked clay with wedge-shaped indentations all over it--and I do mean literally all over it--front, back, and all four edges all bore some kind of marks.

You know the feeling you get when you take out a family heirloom and look at it? Multiply that a few hundred times, and that's the feeling I had while I held that scrap of human history between my fingers and turned it around and around and looked at it, wondering who had written it and for what purpose, what it said, and how it had managed to survive for four thousand years.

It's true that there's little real practical use for this tablet at NIU. We don't have a big classics program, and neither is the history department known for its focus on the ancient world--particularly in that part of the Middle East. Sure, nobody on our faculty can read the thing. What of it? I'm sure we can get someone from the Oriental Institute in Chicago to tell us what it says--though I'm not sure that won't kill just a little of the mystery, especially if it turns out to be little more than somebody's tax receipt or a laundry list. (Though wouldn't that be cool, too?)

I'm sure many of the same arguments could be made about just about any item in the library's collections. It doesn't do to waste money, but I don't feel the funds we spent to buy this little tablet were wasted--far from it. There are bigger issues to consider than sheer utility. There's the "Oooh!" factor--and that's very big for something like this. Cuneiform tablets aren't something you're likely to find in many libraries, and they're fairly rare in museums too, unless you're talking someplace like the Louvre or the British Museum. Cuneiform is among the first forms of writing ever to be discovered. Every book, every journal article, every database that involves text that NIU's library now owns traces its lineage back to something very much like this little clay tablet--and that's an important lesson to teach to our students, for many of whom books are something of a novelty, much less something that had to be written out by hand and then baked to preserve it.

It's not likely to be something that the library staff hand out to just anybody, though I'm quite sure it will be featured in a number of displays and classes, and probably go out to local schools and community libraries as part of our outreach programs. But at least a few of us will get to handle this relic from long ago and far away--and for a few minutes at least, I got to be one of those people. And that was a good day.

Tuesday, 08 April 2008

One of the nicer perks of my job is our departmental subscription to Science, which comes to me first each week. I even occasionally get time to read it before somebody else bugs me for the last issue. Since I had a little downtime yesterday afternoon, I was perusing the March 28 issue when I stumbled across this little item (subscription and/or membership required).

It seems that there may have been a reason why composers in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance composed the way they did. And that reason may have had something to do with the size and shape and construction of the buildings in which their works were performed--which may in turn have had something to do with the way that cathedrals and chapels were designed. An architectural historian took the choir of St. John's College, Cambridge (along with a bunch of acoustics people and some musicologists) on a very special choir tour to Venice, where they sang a variety of works in 11 different churches and chapels around the city.

Polyphonic works (for example, a Byrd Mass--though in some cases that might be a special case--or a Tallis motet) get mushy in great big spaces like the Basilica di San Marco. There's too much room for the sound to bounce around, and it makes it very difficult for the audience to make out the words. Simpler melodies, like plainchant (or Gregorian chant, or simple polyphonic works like Byrd's Masses) work better in the big spaces. The best spot to sing a really complex polyphonic work is in a smaller space, like a side chapel off of the bigger cathedral. The historian speculates that composers may well have tailored their works for the building in which they would be performed (which, really, any good composer should have done). She even speculated that it might have been possible, with a big enough choir, to achieve something like "surround sound"--which may explain some of the really gigantic works in the early polyphonic repertoire, like Tallis's Spem in alium, composed ca. 1570 for 40 voices. That's 40 voice parts (eight choirs of five voices apiece), not just 40 people singing the same three or four parts, by the by.

Having spent some time singing in spaces big and small, and having attended services in some pretty doggone big churches, the group's findings, which were reported, according to Science, at the Cambridge Science Festival last month, don't surprise me much. I distinctly remember a small chapel on the campus of a choir college or a seminary (I don't remember which it was) in Nashville, where we stopped on choir tour my junior year in college. Obviously, since at least one of the functions of the place was to train singers and musicians and directors for choral work, the chapel at the school was designed with singing in mind: all stone and glass and wood, hard surfaces that keep even a small space vibrant.

One of the pieces we were singing that year was C. P. E. Bach's 1749 Magnificat which, while it's a middle-period piece by chronology and should therefore be more in the classical style, is written in a style much closer to the Baroque or Rococo style favored by C. P. E.'s more famous father. (What that means to non-music buffs is that it's a little more florid and has a lot more weaving of the various lines than you would expect in a classical-period piece.) And I do remember that our director had the darnedest time reining in the soloists (including me), because that little space did such wonderful things for a voice that we were all hanging on to notes longer than we should have, just to enjoy the sound a little more.

By contrast, it's really been an experience going to Mass in places like the Basilica of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem, the Church of the Transfiguration on Mount Tabor in the Galilee, or Notre Dame in Paris. All of those spaces are simply huge--and at Notre Dame, just as would have been done in medieval times--while Mass is going on in the central nave, the tourists and the pilgrims continue to go in and out, oohing and aahing as they gawk at the spectacle, in the side aisles. Even with modern microphones and loudspeakers, it can sometimes be difficult to follow what's going on in a space as big as that--particularly if the speaker or the singer(s) isn't careful about enunciating and allowing for the reverb time.

It's nice to know there may be a scientific basis for those empirical observations.

Louis de Cazenave, one of the last two poilus of the First World War, died Sunday, 20 January, at the age of 110 years, announced the Minister of Former Soldiers. The information was later confirmed by his son on France Info. M. de Cazenave died in the morning at his home in Brioude, in the Haute-Loire. He will be buried on Tuesday.

The story goes on to say that de Cazenave was the eldest of the surviving French veterans, born almost two months earlier than the last remaining veteran, a Mr. Lazare Ponticelli. De Cazenave joined a Senegalese colonial regiment in 1916 and fought with it until September 1917, taking part in the Second Battle of the Aisne, along the "Chemin des Dames," where ultimately nearly 100,000 French soldiers gave their lives in the course of nine days, nearly half of those casualties coming on the first day of the battle.

I must confess to being a little torn by the sentiments expressed by MM de Cazenave and Ponticelli against the idea of a state funeral for the last of the poilus. I doubt their fallen comrades would think it presumptuous of them--and it would make some small amends for the generally shabby way that WWI veterans were often treated when they came back home--particularly if they were wounded or handicapped. (And, as the final sentences of the linked article from Le Monde make clear, huge numbers of them were: WWI claimed a total of 9 million dead, all told, and 20 million wounded--half of whom were disfigured.) On the other hand, it's entirely in character that they should refuse the honor due them.

Sadder still than this death is the fact that hardly anyone remembers the Great War, the war that was supposed to end all wars, anymore. Its brutality, futility, and senseless slaughter were superseded by those of the war that followed it just a generation later. World War II and its veterans have become somewhat iconic in late 20th- and early 21st-century culture. They were the "Greatest Generation," fighting in the last "good" war. And now those veterans, too, are dying off in their thousands each day. It won't be much longer before we won't have any living links to those days, either--a situation we are very likely to encounter with regard to its predecessor war before too many more years pass.

Wednesday, 17 October 2007

The president took time out of his busy schedule of tanking in the opinion polls today to chide Congress for neglecting its duties and, in his words, "...sorting out the historical record of the Ottoman Empire." He's referring to a resolution, passed out of committee last week and heading for a vote in the House at some point in the future (but, at least according to NPR this afternoon, losing support right and left), that criticizes the genocide committed against the Armenian minority in the waning days of the Ottoman Empire in 1915.

Modern Turkey is extraordinarily (not to say pathologically) sensitive about that blot upon its national history. In a fit of pique after the congressional committee approved the resolution on a largely party-line vote last week, Ankara recalled its ambassador and has begun to threaten retaliatory measures that would make it far more difficult for Bush to keep his surge in Iraq going. That was the primary reason that the pretzelnit thought Congress should keep its historical opinions to itself and not go out of its way to antagonize "an important ally."

Hold that thought, because I'm going to switch gears for a second and move to another story that was also in the news today. Roughly three hours after appearing in the White House Briefing Room to excoriate Congress for pissing off an important ally, Mr. Bush went up to Capitol Hill to piss off another important ally, China, by presenting the Dalai Lama with the Congressional Gold Medal, the U.S.'s top civilian honor. Can we say "self-referential incoherence," boys and girls?

Just to recap, in the morning Bush said that pissing off Turkey by telling the truth about the Armenian genocide was bad. Then after lunch, he went to the other end of Pennsylvania Avenue to piss off the Chinese by doing the right thing and paying tribute to one of the world's most tireless advocates for peace, himself a victim of Chinese malfeasance.

It would appear, therefore, that Bush is yet again reserving unto himself the right to decide which allies of ours it is safe to piss off, for what reasons, and at what times. No one else is, apparently, allowed to piss off our allies for any reason--even if they're right. Got that?

Frankly, it's as clear as mud to me: apart from the petty partisan politicking, of course, which is both de rigueur and older than Moses's toes. The only reason Bush gives a shit about what Congress thinks about Turkey, Armenians, or genocide isn't that it's pissing off Turkey so much as it is that Turkey is threatening to impede his ability to sustain his endless war on whatever it is we're fighting this particular moment in Iraq. Otherwise, he wouldn't care--and he probably wouldn't have had to have someone brief him this morning on what the Ottoman Empire was, where it was located, who the Armenians were, what the Ottomans did to them, and why. And the main reason Bush took time to castigate Congress for having an opinion on the subject this morning was, of course, because it gave him another opportunity to paint the Democrats in Congress as time-wasters--one of the only subjects in all the world on which Mr. Bush is an expert.

It would be interesting to see a fisk of Bush's press conference this morning, detailing all the things on which Congress is, according to Bush, dragging its feet and/or wasting its time, alongside a listing of all the things that Bush has dragged his feet on, vetoed, axed, or just plain refused to discuss. It would be equally amusing to see a moment-by-moment comparison of how the 110th Congress has spent its time during its first year in office, as opposed to the way the Boy Who Would Be King spent his first 365 days in office. I believe Mr. Bush officially became the president most likely to go on vacation about a year into his present term, when he eclipsed Mr. Reagan's record of some 400+ days off in office (not including all the times when Ronnie simply slept through his official duties without bothering to pay attention--something which Bush is probably also quite good at doing). I believe there is an old saying about stones and people who live in glass houses that one of his few remaining aides would do well to whisper into the pretzelnit's ear long about now, before he embarrasses himself yet again in the national media.

All that said, I think Bush (and Turkey) are flat wrong about the Armenian genocide issue, China is flat-wrong about the Dalai Lama and its continuing occupation of Tibet, and Bush and Congress were absolutely right, and perfectly within their rights, both to receive him in Washington and to bestow upon him the Congressional Gold Medal. The Turks did slaughter hundreds of thousands of Armenians in the early days of the First World War, and the Turkish people have never really either faced up to that fact or done anything meaningful to atone for it. They should do both, quickly, and get it over with--and then they can stop worrying that each time they pick up a newspaper, they're going to see another headline about the issue. The current Turkish government is behaving like a petulant child by recalling its ambassador and attempting to interfere with the passage of men and materiel to and from the Iraqi war zone over the actions of a congressional committee who simply recognized an historical fact that should have been acknowledged and buried at least six decades ago.

Bush should shut the hell up about Congress's involvement in the dispute, and he should really shut up about how the Congress is supposedly shirking its duties. That's a can of worms that you don't want to have opened, Georgie. It will not end well for you--and given that your approval rating has sunk to about the same level as Tricky Dicky's did just before they impeached his ass in 1974, now is not a time when you can afford to become any less popular than you already are.

China needs to get the hell out of Tibet, a sovereign nation which it has illegally occupied and ruthlessly plundered for the last 40 years. And we need to tell Beijing that we will meet with whomever we please, wherever and whenever we please, and if they don't like it they are free to go suck eggs--in return for which, we will be graciously pleased not to press them too hard on cracking down on the rampant piracy and theft of U.S. intellectual property which goes on under Beijing's nose, and which costs this country and its economy tens of millions of dollars each year that we can ill afford to lose, given our gross imbalance of trade with China. And what goes for Tibet goes equally for Taiwan. Neither place belongs under Beijing's sway, no matter how much Beijing may pretend otherwise--and they're going to have to learn to live with that, too.

Monday, 06 August 2007

It's something of a melancholy day in my world. I learned yesterday that a friend and former editor of mine died early yesterday morning, after a brief illness. As I awoke this morning, the local NPR station was having a technical issue and played a few seconds of a story that seemed to indicate that the former cardinal archbishop of Paris, Jean-Marie Lustiger, had recently died. (I was able to confirm that when I checked the headlines on my news reader, though NPR never did replay the clip.) And today is, of course, the sixty-second anniversary of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima at the end of the Second World War.

I'm going to start with the NPR glitch, because frankly, I'm more than a little cheesed off that they didn't find the story of sufficient importance to feature it on the morning newscast. I would happily have foregone the usual Monday morning five minutes with Cokie Roberts (who as usual had nothing of any substance to say), or the puff piece about quinceañeras, to hear a bit more about the life and times of the son of a Polish rabbi who became a Catholic during the Phony War, and rose to the dignity of the crimson in his adopted land and somehow managed to be a bridge (though not always an uncontroversial one) between the Judaism of his birth and the Catholicism of his adulthood, the strictly secular country in which he was born and lived and the church he loved and served. Once upon a time, that is exactly the kind of story one heard routinely on NPR. That seems to happen less and less often now, and that's unfortunate.

Wednesday, 04 July 2007

When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.--That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, --That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.--Such has been the patient sufferance of these Colonies; and such is now the necessity which constrains them to alter their former Systems of Government. The history of the present King of Great Britain is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute Tyranny over these States. To prove this, let Facts be submitted to a candid world.

He has refused his Assent to Laws, the most wholesome and necessary for the public good.

He has forbidden his Governors to pass Laws of immediate and pressing importance, unless suspended in their operation till his Assent should be obtained; and when so suspended, he has utterly neglected to attend to them.

He has refused to pass other Laws for the accommodation of large districts of people, unless those people would relinquish the right of Representation in the Legislature, a right inestimable to them and formidable to tyrants only.

He has called together legislative bodies at places unusual, uncomfortable, and distant from the depository of their public Records, for the sole purpose of fatiguing them into compliance with his measures.

He has dissolved Representative Houses repeatedly, for opposing with manly firmness his invasions on the rights of the people.

He has refused for a long time, after such dissolutions, to cause others to be elected; whereby the Legislative powers, incapable of Annihilation, have returned to the People at large for their exercise; the State remaining in the mean time exposed to all the dangers of invasion from without, and convulsions within.

He has endeavoured to prevent the population of these States; for that purpose obstructing the Laws for Naturalization of Foreigners; refusing to pass others to encourage their migrations hither, and raising the conditions of new Appropriations of Lands.

He has obstructed the Administration of Justice, by refusing his Assent to Laws for establishing Judiciary powers.

He has made Judges dependent on his Will alone, for the tenure of their offices, and the amount and payment of their salaries.

He has erected a multitude of New Offices, and sent hither swarms of Officers to harrass our people, and eat out their substance.

He has kept among us, in times of peace, Standing Armies without the Consent of our legislatures.

He has affected to render the Military independent of and superior to the Civil power.

He has combined with others to subject us to a jurisdiction foreign to our constitution, and unacknowledged by our laws; giving his Assent to their Acts of pretended Legislation:

For Quartering large bodies of armed troops among us:

For protecting them, by a mock Trial, from punishment for any Murders which they should commit on the Inhabitants of these States:

For cutting off our Trade with all parts of the world:

For imposing Taxes on us without our Consent:

For depriving us in many cases, of the benefits of Trial by Jury:

For transporting us beyond Seas to be tried for pretended offences

For abolishing the free System of English Laws in a neighbouring Province, establishing therein an Arbitrary government, and enlarging its Boundaries so as to render it at once an example and fit instrument for introducing the same absolute rule into these Colonies:

He is at this time transporting large Armies of foreign Mercenaries to compleat the works of death, desolation and tyranny, already begun with circumstances of Cruelty & perfidy scarcely paralleled in the most barbarous ages, and totally unworthy the Head of a civilized nation.

He has constrained our fellow Citizens taken Captive on the high Seas to bear Arms against their Country, to become the executioners of their friends and Brethren, or to fall themselves by their Hands.

He has excited domestic insurrections amongst us, and has endeavoured to bring on the inhabitants of our frontiers, the merciless Indian Savages, whose known rule of warfare, is an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes and conditions.

In every stage of these Oppressions We have Petitioned for Redress in the most humble terms: Our repeated Petitions have been answered only by repeated injury. A Prince whose character is thus marked by every act which may define a Tyrant, is unfit to be the ruler of a free people.

Nor have We been wanting in attentions to our Brittish brethren. We have warned them from time to time of attempts by their legislature to extend an unwarrantable jurisdiction over us. We have reminded them of the circumstances of our emigration and settlement here. We have appealed to their native justice and magnanimity, and we have conjured them by the ties of our common kindred to disavow these usurpations, which, would inevitably interrupt our connections and correspondence. They too have been deaf to the voice of justice and of consanguinity. We must, therefore, acquiesce in the necessity, which denounces our Separation, and hold them, as we hold the rest of mankind, Enemies in War, in Peace Friends.

We, therefore, the Representatives of the united States of America, in General Congress, Assembled, appealing to the Supreme Judge of the world for the rectitude of our intentions, do, in the Name, and by Authority of the good People of these Colonies, solemnly publish and declare, That these United Colonies are, and of Right ought to be Free and Independent States; that they are Absolved from all Allegiance to the British Crown, and that all political connection between them and the State of Great Britain, is and ought to be totally dissolved; and that as Free and Independent States, they have full Power to levy War, conclude Peace, contract Alliances, establish Commerce, and to do all other Acts and Things which Independent States may of right do. And for the support of this Declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor.

Happy Birthday to the United States. God grant that when we celebrate it again next year, it will be in better circumstances.

Wednesday, 06 June 2007

It's time to say au revoir to la belle France. As always, I'm torn at times like this. I like an awful lot of things about this country, and I've had a very productive trip and a ton of fun while I wasn't working in this or that archive, pawing through dusty files or poring over microfilm. On the other hand, it's been nearly a month since I slept in my own bed. I'm tired of living out of a suitcase, of not being able to keep up with all my favorite television programs (my TiVo is going to be full when I get back!). I even miss my job and my coworkers, to say nothing of my friends and family.

All in all, I'm ready to go home and glad that the day for doing so is nearly here. The cab will pick me up early tomorrow morning, and then I hope to have a safe and uneventful flight home, though the weather forecast for Chicago and vicinity isn't looking terribly good for tomorrow--there's supposed to be a monster storm front moving in late tomorrow evening, which will produce strong gusty winds (in the 50 mph range) all day. That could complicate a landing, so I hope they'll let us take off and that there will be just enough of a window of good weather at the right time to get us down. The last thing I want to do after a 9.5-hour transatlantic flight is get diverted to Milwaukee or Detroit and have to wait for the weather to calm down--which, according to the in-house meteorologist at my university, won't be until Friday.

I will probably have a wrap-up post covering the whole trip, and some more pictures, sometime this weekend. First I've got to get home, fight off the jet lag, take care of the laundry, get the mail service resumed, get reacquainted with friends and family, and then on Monday it's back to the usual routine. Plus, I've got an overdue paper on the Russian Revolution to finish writing this summer, and I've been asked to expand on the paper I presented last October in Minneapolis for consideration for inclusion in the conference proceedings. So no rest for the wicked--or the terminally busy.

Monday, 28 May 2007

Appropriately, my last full day in Colmar was a rainy one. I could have done with less appropriateness, considering I had to walk all the way from my hotel to the archives in the rain this morning, lugging a 25-pound briefcase. It was pretty well damp all the way through by the time I got there, and so was the right sleeve of my jacket, despite my best efforts to make my little portable umbrella stretch to cover both sides.

I say "appropriate" because I'm sad to be leaving this lovely little corner of Alsace. As I was walking down the stairs to breakfast this morning, I was reminded of Verlaine's lines:

Il pleut sur la ville
Comme il pleure dans mon coeur.

"It rains on the city
As it weeps in my heart."

This is such a nice little town, with such a quaint center. The staff at the hotel, and even more so the staff at the archives, have been entirely friendly, accommodating, and helpful. I'm not looking forward to the day the occupation archives move back to Paris, let me tell you.

Anyway, I'm off on an early-morning train to Paris tomorrow. Not sure what kind of internet access I'll have at the hotel, so this may be the last blog post for awhile, or at least the end of the pictures. Last time I stayed in this particular hotel, they had a machine in the lobby that you could buy time on, but which didn't have a USB port. I'm hoping they'll have upgraded to a wireless network in the two years since I was last there. Given that they cater mainly to businesspeople, I'm hoping that's happened. But I won't know for sure until I get there.

Once I'm there, I've got a day in Vincennes to clean up some stuff at the army archives, and the rest of my time will be prowling through the archives at the Foreign Ministry. I don't know exactly what they have, or how much of it is accessible, so my main objective is to get an idea of what they've got locked away that I might want to have a look at and, hopefully, to make a good impression on the staff so they let me bend a few rules or at least bring me my materials on time. One never knows with librarians and archivists--as I was told in library school a decade and more ago, there are librarians in the world who see their job as protecting the materials in their care from the people who want to use them. Those are the ones that give the rest of us a bad name, and I'm hoping I don't encounter any of them.

I do plan on trying to see a little tennis when I've some free time. I hear there's some tournament or other being played someplace called Roland Garros and since I'll be in the neighborhood, I think I'll drop in. I doubt I'd be able to find (or afford) any of the good seats, so don't bother looking for me on NBC's or USA's coverage. But I'm looking forward to being able to say that I've at least been to Roland Garros while the French Open was going on.